Sorry Merriam-Webster, the hot dog is not a sandwich

To kick off Memorial Day weekend, Merriam-Webster dropped a bomb on hot-dog lovers everywhere.

In a blog post on May 27, Merriam-Webster defined a sandwich as a food that has "a filling" between two pieces of bread — which, by that logic, means a sausage inside a bun technically counts.

Some in the Tech Insider newsroom agreed, arguing that "sandwich" is an all-encompassing term. The same way squares are rectangles, hot dogs are open-faced sandwiches, they said.

This is absolutely, without-a-doubt wrong.

For one, by Merriam-Webster's definition, you could slap anything between two slices of bread and call it a "sandwich." Would it be right to call a burrito or quesadilla a sandwich? Hell, no.

If you look into the history of the hot dog in the US, you'll see that it was often called a "Coney Island sandwich," "Dachshund sandwich," or a "Frankfurter sandwich."

But though our forefathers may have used the word sandwich, we now have a more nuanced vocabulary to classify what we eat. Language is always evolving, as does our societal consensus about what we call certain foods. The hot dog is its own food altogether.

Even the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council agrees. Calling a hot dog a sandwich strips it of its culinary identity, it said in a 2015 blog post.

"Limiting the hot dog's significance by saying it's 'just a sandwich' is like calling the Dalai Lama 'just a guy,'" said NHDSC President Janet Riley. "Perhaps at one time its importance could be limited by forcing it into a larger sandwich category ... but that time has passed."

When we asked Twitter, over 100 people told us the hot dog is not a sandwich.

So please, this Memorial Day, don't be a barbarian. At the party, don't eye the hot dogs and then ask your friend to pass you a sandwich — unless you want a table full of side-eyes.